April 2008 - Posts

• More Light Than Heat

  While no one will argue that the four IT mega vendors (IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft) are an insignifcant part of the Business Intelligence landscape, Mary Hayes Weier's recent article in Intelligent Enterprise "How to Choose Among the Four Bright Lights of BI" definitely overstates the case for their prominence.* Even if you concede that these vendors are the bright lights of BI--which is debatable--they're definitely not the ones generating heat.  At the moment, hot topics abound in Business Intelligence.  Dynamic visualization is hot.  In-memory analytics, also hot. Real-time Business Intelligence and convergence of BI with other enterprise technologies are also hot topics.  The list goes on, and all of the tools that will ultimately result in the realization of that hottest of topics, Pervasive BI, are themselves hot.  Looking at these topics and technologies, however, one notices a distinct lack of mega-vendors leading the way.  In the cases where they are doing something, it's because they've recently acquired a smaller company that was cutting edge (Microsoft's buying FAST for enterprise search comes to mind). So sure, maybe they're the leading lights, but they're hardly blazing trails.  Doug Henschen--the Editor-in-Chief at Intelligent Enterprise--makes some points along these lines, noting that the field is still open for innovation: [T]his is just the beginning of the journey for the mega vendors in BI, and it's just the beginning for a market that could easily be redefined by developments we can scarcely imagine. The "Bright Lights" article offers a solid analysis of the mega vendor paths forward, but I'd submit that these four companies don't control the destiny of the market or the limits of what you'll be able to do with BI technology in the years ahead. I agree completely, but I'd take what Doug is saying a step further.  I don't think that IBM, SAP, Oracle or Microsoft control the destiny of what you can you with BI technology now.  They may be talking about moving beyond BI's traditional userbase, but they're not the ones actually doing it.    * More preceisely, the title overstates the case--the article itself turns out to be an easily digestible comparison of the BI offerings of the mega-vendors.  Interesting, but much less provocative than the title indicates. Posted Apr 18 2008, 11:22 AM by Tim Wormus with no comments

• More on the Primary Donations

  We're continuing to work with the Huffington Post on analysis of the primary donation data that I referenced in this post.  Most recently, Sam Stein--keying off the recent dust-up about Obama's "bitter" comments--asked if we could separate the donation for the rural areas of Pennsylvania from the urban and suburban areas around Pittsburg and Philadelphia to see how his donations levels compared to Clinton's in these two distinct areas of the state. Sen. Barack Obama's political opponents charge that his recent remarks on the economic woes and bitterness of low-income voters put him gravely out of touch with small town Pennsylvanians. But a review of campaign finance records -- conducted for The Huffington Post by the Spotfire Division of software firm TIBCO -- reveals that it is Obama, not Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has received the majority of donations from these very same Keystone State communities.  Check out his article here.     Posted Apr 15 2008, 11:25 PM by Tim Wormus with no comments

• Spotfire 2.1 and the Road to Pervasive Analytics

  We announced the release of version 2.1 of Spotfire at the Gartner BI Summit last week, and got some very positive coverage.  While there are a number of cool new features, the one that people found to be the most interesting are the APIs which we've introduced allowing parts of a Spotfire analysis to be incorporated into mash ups.  What's exciting about this for me is that it's a key step on the road to truly pervasive analytics. We hear a fair bit about Pervasive, Ubitquious and Embedded BI these days, and not without good reason.  As I mentioned in a previous post, if Business Intelligence is going to grow beyond it's traditional users it's going to have to address the processes of other users directly, rather than in the guise of BI.  By allowing IT organizations to combine analytic applications directly with the tools currently addressing these processes, Spotfire now makes it much easier to do this. This, to me, is precisely the direction that BI and Analytics need to go if it's going to expand to the other 80% - 90% of the enterprise.  End users who aren't already using BI as such probably won't ever use it.  But that doesn't mean that they can't benefit from the analytic tools and techniques that have blossomed in recent years, they just need those tools to exist in process- or function-specific contexts. As long as vendors try to control the frame in which BI is delivered, I think that they are unlikely to gain much acceptance beyond their current user communities. Posted Apr 08 2008, 07:31 PM by Tim Wormus with no comments

• New Technologies Drive BI Adoption?

  Over at Intelligent Enterprise, Niel Raden has some thoughts kicked off by Gartner's recent report on the future of BI,  "Emerging Technologies Will Drive Self-Service Business  Intelligence," which takes positions that Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel reitterated and elaborated on in an interview with Doug Henchen and again at the Gartner BI summit in Chicago this last week. I'm having some problems with a March 20, 2008 article titled "Gartner: Emerging Technologies Will Help Drive Mainstream BI Adoption." This has been the Holy Grail of BI vendors for over a decade — to increase the number of "seats" using their products, widely reported to be about 20 percent of an organization but clearly much less than that. What troubles me the most about this article, or rather, about Gartner's analysis, is the supposition that new technology is going to crack this old chestnut. Raden goes into some detail about why he thinks each of the five technologies which Gartner identified (Interactive visualization, In-memory analytics, Search integrated with BI, SaaS and SOA) are insufficient to drive broad scale adoption of Business Intelligence.  If Business Intelligence remains as it currently is, he's obviously right--the pool of users who want what traditional BI offers is largly tapped out, and so broader adoption will mean that BI needs to offer something which will appeal to sets of users who, up until now haven't wanted or needed BI.  But it's important to point out that this fact doesn't mean there aren't opportunties for BI-like technologies to improve business processes.  Raden's partner James Taylor points out that mainstream adoption of Business Intelligence "would mean that everyone in an organization - down to the people paid minimum wage at the front line - are making better decisions thanks to the understanding an organization has of its data."  Since we're clearly not there yet, there will be opportunities to bring BI in one form or another to a much broader set of people than the current set of BI users. As BI reaches past its core users, it will need to adapt to suit a broader set of needs and business processes.  And if you look at the five technologies which Gartner identifed, all of them either make it easier for non-traditional users of Business Intelligence to access and interact with their data (Interactive visualization, In-memory analytics, Integrated Search), or ease the support burden of additional users and use cases on IT organizations (SOA, SaaS).  It seems to me that even if these technologies aren't sufficient to drive increasing BI adoption, they do enable it. In reality, what will drive increasing BI adoption are the same things that drive all business innovation--things like increasing competition, global challenges, tighter regulatory environments and other issues that businesses across all industries have to face.  The more interesting question is what will broad-scale BI adoption look like, and it's one I'll address in a subsequent post. Posted Apr 05 2008, 01:00 PM by Tim Wormus with no comments